"Transatlantic Fictions" (Sept. 15, 2011; ASECS March 22-25, 2012)

full name / name of organization:

Melissa Ganz, Harvard University

contact email:

mganz@fas.harvard.edu

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
San Antonio, TX
March 22-25, 2012

This panel seeks to examine Anglo-American literary and cultural relations from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. How do British writers use American settings to imagine the relationship between the Old World and the New? How do early American writers draw upon and/or contest British literary and political traditions? In what ways do cross-cultural encounters in novels, plays, poems, letters, or autobiographies reflect and/or shape constructions of gender, race, and nation in the Enlightenment? Panelists might examine scenes of trade or travel or accounts of slavery, captivity, revolution, or war. Papers that reflect upon the historical, theoretical, or methodological implications of their analyses and/or that situate readings of individual texts in the context of recent debates in transatlantic studies are especially welcome.